CORBA switching: A network approach.

Abstract

This thesis introduces the concept of CORBA switching. CORBA switching is a network approach to increase the reliability of the current CORBA standard, CORBA 2.3. The CORBA Switch implements the concepts of fault-tolerance, load balancing, versioning, network security and quality of service into a distributed CORBA application. By introducing a CORBA switch into the network, these concepts can be introduced without any modification to the clients or servers. A prototype CORBA Switch was designed and implemented. A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the impact of a CORBA Switch on a distributed CORBA application. The results obtained showed that the CORBA Switch increased the reliability of a distributed CORBA application while adding a very negligible amount of delay into the system. Unlike previous approaches, this thesis shows that the CORBA Switch can deal with all of the following concepts: fault-tolerance, load balancing, versioning, network security and quality of service, while not requiring any modification to existing CORBA clients and server.